1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a message system for a communication terminal and relates specifically to a system for conveying messages such as speech or video via a server.
2. Description of Related Art
Generally, in a voice message service for a mobile communication system for portable phones, a caller terminal can leave a message by speech or video in a server in a case in which the caller called a receiver terminal but could not reach the receiver for some reason. The receiver terminal receives a notification from the server that the message was registered, so that the receiver terminal connects to the server to receive the message. The caller terminal can thus convey a message from its user to a user of the receiver terminal even if the user of the caller terminal cannot directly communicate with the user of the receiver side.
However, in the voice message service, it is more difficult for a user of the caller terminal to express emotions compared with a case in which the user can directly talk to the user of the receiver. The range of emotional expressions by body language or by tone of voice will inevitably be less in a situation in which a human talks to the machine without the presence of the corresponding party, and even more so in a case in which a message does not include video and only contains speech. As a result, the emotion intended by the caller sometimes is not fully reflected in the message left in a voice message.
To solve this problem, a mobile communication system is known in which a caller terminal can append information indicating a type of emotion input by a user to a speech message for a receiver, and the receiver terminal can receive a message with emotion information before receiving the speech message (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-184987 (Abstract, section [0023]).
Also known is a phone answering machine capable of determining emotions of a caller based on the speech signals in a voice message and capable of controlling the order of message playing in accordance with the degree of importance of the received voice message or with a value indicating the degree of emotion (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-049657 (Abstract)).
There is also known an image processing system in which, in an image message, the facial expressions of a shot image are determined, so that a component to be emphasized is visualized for use in videophones (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-193824 (Abstract)).
Furthermore, there is known a communication system that has a chat server that detects emotion parameters based on speech data and image data, to generate emotion data, that generates synthesized facial expression data by synthesizing the emotion data with facial expression data extracted from image data, and that generates a character synthesis image by synthesizing character data with the synthesized facial expression data (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2006-330958 (Abstract)).
In addition, a portable phone is known that is capable of generating an email by performing speech emotion recognition on the speech input by a user (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2006-277567 (Abstract)).
However, even in a case in which a user of the caller terminal selects information indicating emotion, the user does not necessarily precisely understand his own emotional state. Therefore, the emotion that the user of the caller terminal intends to convey does not always agree with impression the user of the receiver terminal actually receives when the message is actually conveyed to the receiver user. Conversely, merely reading the emotion of a message automatically by emotion recognition software might give an incorrect impression to a receiver user because a result of the recognition result sometimes does not correspond to the emotion intended by the caller user.